Sipeed Tang Mega 138K Pro Dock features GOWIN GW5AST FPGA + RISC-V SoC

Sipeed has launched another FPGA board part of their Tang family with the Tang Mega 138K Pro Dock powered by a GOWIN GW5AST SoC with 138K logic elements as well as an 800 MHz AE350_SOC RISC-V hardcore unit, and featuring a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface, DVI Rx and Tx, two SFP+ cages, a Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 port, and more.

We’ve previously seen companies like AMD (Xilinx) and Microchip produce FPGA SoCs with hard cores such as the Zynq Ultrascale+ family (4x Cortex-A53) or the PolarFire MPSoC (4x 64-bit SiFive U54 RISC-V cores), but it’s the first time I see GOWIN introduce an FPGA + RISC-V SoC, as all the previous parts that came to my attention were FPGA devices.

Sipeed Tang Mega 138K Pro Dock specifications:

• System-on-Module – Sipeed Tang Mega 138K Pro
  • SoC FPGA – GOWIN GW5AST-LV138FPG676A with
    • 138,240 LUT4
    • 1,080 Kb Shadow SRAM (SSRAM)
    • 6,120 Kb Block SRAM (BSRAM)
    • Number of BSRAM – 340
    • 298x DSP slices
    • 12x PLLs
    • 16x global clocks
    • 24x HCLK
    • 8x transceivers at 270Mbps to 12.5Gbps
    • Hard CPU – 32-bit RISC-V AE350_SOC @ 800 MHz
  • System Memory – 1GB DDR3
  • Storage – 2x 128Mbit Flash
  • Carrier board interface – 3x board-to-board connectors
  • Debugging – 8-pin JTAG + UART connector
  • Misc – Various keys and LEDs
  • Dimensions – 70 x 50 mm
• Storage – MicroSD card slot, EEPROM
• Video Input/Output
  • DVI Tx and DVi Rx ports
  • LCD connector
  • 2x MIPI CSI connector for cameras
  • DVP camera connector
• Audio
  • Speaker header
  • 3.5mm stereo audio jack
  • Microphone array connector
• Networking
  • 2x SPF+ cages
  • Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 port
• USB – 1x USB Type-C “Soft USB” port
• Expansion
  • 3x Pmod connectors
  • PCIe 3.0 x4 edge connector
  • 40-pin GPIO header
  • M.2  B-key socket
• Debugging – USB-C port for JTAG and UART
• Misc – Power switch, 1x RGB LED, 6x user LEDs, fan connector
• Power Supply – 12V via DC jack
• Dimensions – 147.1 x 93.2 mm

The board is programmable with the usual Gowin IDE, but the wiki is currently only available in Chinese language with the English translation likely to come a little later. Alternatively, you can access several code samples on GitHub showing how to use the DVI interfaces, LCD interface, camera interfaces, PCIe, SFP+ cages, and so on. There’s nothing that I can find about the RISC-V core on the Sipeed website, but GOWIN provides various developer guides and tools for the AE350_SOC which you can only access after registering to the company’s website.

The Sipeed Tang Mega 138K Pro Dock is available for pre-order for $195 on Aliexpress with a 12V/2A power supply and cables, but there’s a $20 “store coupon” bringing the price down to $175. There’s also an LCD kit for $209, and the Sipeed Tang Mega 138K Pro system-on-module without carrier board is offered for $119 before the $20 discount. Deliveries are scheduled to start at the end of October. You may follow the progress on Twitter/X.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.

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